My Short Life in Charter Schools

My experiences with charter schools (a school that receives public funding from the school district, and may share a building with a public school, but does not have to adhere to the same regulations around pedagogy and management) began in 2018 when I was first transitioning from after-school to full-time teaching. I was applying to practically every technology and computer science teaching position I saw online.

One of my first interviews was at an Uncommon Schools¹ in Brownsville, Brooklyn. They emailed me at midnight on Wednesday to schedule a three-hour school visit and demo lesson at 8:00AM that same Friday. They sent me videos of two teachers’ lessons to review, paying close attention to their techniques for “redirecting scholars” and their “aggressive monitoring”. After pushing back a bit on the tight turnaround, they explained that “we are hiring as urgently as possible for the role because our students need a teacher.” I mean, I was aware of the fact that they needed a teacher, but I agreed to come in. I got to witness their silent “Brain Breakfast” where students silently completed work during breakfast, and teachers walked around writing compliments and greetings on their papers. It was as strange as it sounds. Probably luckily, I did not get the job.

At the time, I was aware of the debates around charter schools, but I didn’t know the true extent of the damage these schools have caused to our education system. I didn’t know that charter schools tend to increase segregation in schools, manipulate student test data, and generally, use public funds without any public accountability. I also didn’t know, but would come to experience firsthand, how these schools sustain their empires of “educational excellence” on the backs of inexperienced, non-unionized teachers who don’t know to expect any better².

My next interview was a group interview at the central offices of Success Academy, the largest charter network in NYC, serving about 17,000 students across 47 schools at the time³. When the 30-odd applicants settled into the large conference room, we were told this would be one of the interviews Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of the network, would drop in on. Our first activity involved entering a smaller room in groups of ten with Eva and going around a circle to essentially practice disciplining a student according to a particular script. After each person demonstrated, Eva would make corrections and have them try again.

When everyone had gone, Eva expounded on the advantages of working at Success Academy: “we”, she explained, “do not have the pesky teachers’ union getting between us and families, or between us and our teachers”. Here, she said, “we have more flexibility in how our teachers teach, and a more communal environment than public schools, thanks to this unmediated dynamic”.

We then shuffled back to the conference room and wrote a paper on a poem followed by some additional questions on a computer. After all thirty of us had left the building, another applicant and I discussed Eva’s speech. It gave us both trepidation: what did the school leadership want to do that required almost no limits to be placed on them? Wasn’t the teachers’ union there to protect teachers? I also did not get this job, which I am thankful for every day.

Finally, after about three months, I ended up at the New American Academy Charter School, a small charter elementary school in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. As a new teacher, the work was difficult and tiring, but I loved the students, and my fellow teachers were supportive. Leadership, however, was another story. One experience in particular later on revealed what I really meant to them.

On my bike ride to work one morning in November 2019, I was hit by a car, and my (helmetted) head struck the asphalt (the car drove away before I could register the plate number or reach out to emergency services.) There was no blood beyond a scraped knee, but I felt I should go to the emergency room. My ears were ringing and I felt like crying, but I managed to call my boss Jenny, a “Master Teacher” at the school, to tell her I would be late. Her first response after I reported what had happened: Could I please call the gym or music teacher so they would know to cover my class by splitting the students between them? She may have briefly asked if I was OK after that. I was out of it, but still shocked. Surely that was something she could have done? Why was it my responsibility to find coverage after literally getting hit by a car? Leadership’s concern for me as a teacher was essentially just that I was punctually in the building at 8:00 and able to cover my classes.

The concussion I got from the crash would give me migraines multiple times a week for the next few months, at times making the job of teaching even more difficult. I received little support from leadership when these migraines came on; no flexibility with scheduling, no additional sick time. In fact, I was hit in the head by a rogue football thrown by a member of the leadership team during my recess coverage a few weeks later, causing, you guessed it, a migraine. I still get migraines stemming from the accident today. And I still hear Jenny’s response in my head, and her reminder later that day—make sure you submit your sick time!

Like many other charter schools, the model of this school was a fairly disciplinary one. I once came into a particularly strict teacher’s classroom after lunch to teach my class. The class had apparently done something wrong, and half of the students were crying (though it was not explained to me what exactly had happened). I had also witnessed this same teacher throw a student’s clothespin for their classroom clip chart (example below) on the floor saying “I would throw this in the trashcan if I didn’t need it tomorrow”.

I later did some reading about Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of Success Academy that I and twenty-nine others had the dubious honor of meeting during our interview. Trump actually considered her for Secretary of Education in his first term. Her bonafides as an education privatizer and school-as-a-business practitioner are strong—her bonafides as an educator less so. Her schools have come under criticism for, among other things, their highly punitive attitude towards students of color. In June 2020, a Success Academy spokesperson resigned for what she claimed was the “systemic abuse of students, parents, and employees”. Under their “no excuses” model, students are given demerits for relatively small misbehaviors: slouching, uniform infractions, or lateness. Every teacher I know who has worked there has described it as among the worst jobs they’ve ever had. Some had to work onsite until six in the evening or later, were asked to complete deliverables over weekends, and to make themselves available to parent calls even outside of these hours—all of which are definitely out of the norm in most private and public schools. Their school year also starts about a month before public schools do, without any commensurate increase in pay. Many charter networks place similar demands on teachers.

Charter schools are in many ways a capitalist’s dream of an education system. The billions in government spending locked away from their access under union contracts and school board governance are freed for their ingress. The unionized teacher’s workday, negotiated over years between unions and school boards, is an agreed upon length of time, generally not changing from year to year. Charter schools allow this to be renegotiated, extracting more value from their teachers’ workdays. In his seminal work Capital, published in 1867, Karl Marx wrote, “The normalization of the working day has thus played out, over the course of the history of capitalist production, as a struggle over the limits of the workday—a struggle between the collective capitalist, or the members of the capitalist class, and the collective worker, or the members of the working class.”⁴ 150 years later, we are seeing this struggle play out in charter schools. Charter schools and their billionaire backers push for longer hours and school years under more intensive conditions, and teachers, having little bargaining power, typically either grin and bear it or resign after a year or two, depleted⁵. I myself felt the bodily effects of the intense demands on teachers, in my worsening migraines and general fatigue. I worked at the charter school for about a year and a half before collapsing in an exhausted heap.

Marx didn’t have charter schools in mind when he wrote “with its blind drive, its bottomless werewolf-hunger for surplus labor, capital doesn’t merely push past the moral limits of the working day. It does the same with the physical limits, too. Capital usurps the time that the body needs to grow and develop, and also the time for maintaining the body in a healthy condition.”⁶ but he could have. As representatives of capital, charter school leaders carry out this process, intensifying the conditions of work for teachers. For the children who attend these charter schools, the benefits of these draconian conditions are dubious. The only people who seem to win in this system are people like Eva Moskowitz, exploiting the labor of young, naive teachers, mistreating children, and accumulating wealth as a direct result.